


ERROR 410

by Friedom



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Extinction, Gen, Horror, Leitner Books (The Magnus Archives), Original Statement, Sort Of, or something like it, scifi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:48:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27729793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Friedom/pseuds/Friedom
Summary: An original statement based on the idea of a choose-your-own-adventure Leitner of sorts
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	ERROR 410

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: unedited  
> This is kind of an idea I have been toying with for a while, and I decided to just write it out since I hadn't gotten much else done today yet. I hope some people enjoy it!

Statement of Al Davies, 23rd March 2012

“It all started when I found that website. I was bored, browsing some coding forum that I frequented at the time, pretty classic stuff. When suddenly, some guy - I don’t remember the username and I cannot for the life of me find the thread anywhere, believe me, I’ve tried everything – posted a link. Said “check this out!” just like that, no description or anything. And well, I was bored. This was before anyone had taught me what a computer virus was, so I just… clicked the link.

At first, it looked perfectly ordinary. A mostly blank page, light yellow background, some default font displaying the prompt “Enter your Name:,” a text entry field and an ‘Enter’ button. All pretty standard.

I entered my online nickname, AI-Al, I know, very creative. I came up with it when I was like 13, to be fair, and somehow it has stuck to the point that pretty much everyone calls me Al even in real life these days. Either way, I clicked Enter.

It was one of those text-based adventure things that are popular in some online crowds, three or four options after every paragraph of text. At the beginning, it seemed like your basic high school story sort of situation, dropping you in a classroom full of dickheads, though at first I wasn’t sure what the actual goal was.

It was a bit weird, the interactions never seemed to give you any hint as to whether you were making the right choices or no. There weren’t any stats or anything displayed, like those games sometimes have, and it just didn’t seem to have any _point_.

Then suddenly, everything in the game went wrong. The first time I played it, it was a tsunami wrecking your town. I think my character was in class at the time, cause I remember that the text went into gruesome detail on what exactly killed each of the people I had interacted with during breaks.

I was shocked, but also kind of excited. What a weird game! I immediately wanted to show it to my best friend, Frankie. So I sent them an email, telling them to check out this weird game I had found and the link. 

Frankie emailed me back not 5 minutes later, just a string of question marks and a smiley with a raised brow. I laughed and replied, urging them to try it and tell me what ending they got.

Maybe half an hour later, while I was in the middle of doing another playthrough myself, Frankie emailed me again.

“No way, my school got levelled by a malfunction in a nearby atomic power plant in the middle of history class. What even is this game?”

I read it but forewent answering for the moment, instead going back to my own game. Didn’t take long for the volcanic incident to torch my character and co.

Suffice to say, Frankie and I were fascinated. We both played the game again and again, sending each other updates on all the grotesque ways we managed to die in what seemed to be an endless string of catastrophes. Weirdly, even when picking the same choices again and again, it never repeated the same ending, even between the two of us.

A few hours in, my mum came in and yelled at me for ignoring her. I hadn’t realised how sucked into those words on my screen I had been, she had been calling me to come help with dinner prep for a few minutes now. I left my browser open and went to go do as I was told, then after that I got roped into playing console games with my little sister after.

When I returned to my room hours later, the site had refreshed and was now showing an error code: “410 – Gone”. I reloaded, but got only that same error once again. Confused, I checked in my email inbox for how Frankie had been faring.

There were a few messages from them in there alright, most of them continuing in the same vein that we had been going on with all afternoon. Making morbid jokes at the expense of the fictional tragedies of these characters along with speculation what the person who had created the game may have been thinking.

Frankie seemed to have continued on playing far longer than me, the last message from them dating to only about half an hour before my return. That wasn’t so odd; their parents were rarely home and they had a tendency to forget food when having fun. They came over a lot for that exact reason, but my mum had forbidden any visits until I ironed out some bad grades I had been raking in, so instead we were chatting via email.

As I read through Frankie’s messages, they started becoming… strange. Not in a way you would immediately pick up on if you didn’t know Frankie’s messaging style like I did, but I noticed that more and more, they weren't having fun anymore. They started sounding… obsessed. And not in the fun way. 

Frankie kept going on about “finding the good ending,” about how surely there was at least one branch of the story that had some sort of explanation. More and more, they were growing frustrated with the constant death and destruction. And it sounded like maybe Frankie wasn’t talking about just some internet game anymore. "What kind of depressing existence is this, doing your best but always, always dying for no reason?" they wrote in one of the later ones. 

Their very last message read “There’s no escaping our end, is there?”

Worried, I messaged them to ask whether they were ok. I didn’t get any reply.

Frankie didn’t come to school the next day, or the next, or after the weekend. At one point, a police officer came to talk to me at my parents’ flat, asking me whether I knew anything about Frankie wanting to run away. Apparently, they had disappeared from their room, no sign of forced entry or taking anything with them. It was in the papers, “Franklin Archer Missing,” a big deal for a small town like ours.

I’ve refreshed that web page every day for the last 5 years, but it still only shows that damned error. It’s ‘Gone,’ and somehow, it took my best friend, the only person who understood who I was back then, with it.

I hope Frankie’s dead, if I’m honest. The other option is that they may still be out there somewhere, being killed over and over by increasingly unheard of disasters, trying frantically to find any way to influence their ending…

Now that I think about it; Aren’t we all, in the end?”


End file.
